Good News 1Feb2019: Staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis in Reef Front of Vauxhall Reef, Barbados 1Feb2019

In March of 2015 I observed Acropora cervicornis in a small area on the Reef Front of the Vauxhall Reef.

According to a report by R. MacLean and H.A. Oxenford on surveys of Acroporoids on the west coast of Barbados in the summer of 2015, “although no A. cervicornis colonies were found on the fringing reefs surveyed in this study, several colonies are known to exist in the deeper patch reef area immediately seaward of some of the fringing reefs (e.g. Vauxhall reef, see annotated photographs of D. Patriquin at: http://versicolor.ca/reef/).

So evidently, the population I observed is the only one known for Barbados (at least in 2016 when the MacLean * Oxenford report was published). The species was abundant when I was in Barbados in the period 1966-1970, and had largely or completely died out when I was at the Bellairs Institute in 1984.

Today (Feb 1) I returned to the area, and with a little searching found the same colonies. I also saw two separate younger colonies about 30 m distant from the larger patch. The latter covers an area of approx 4 x 2 m.

View www.versicolor.ca/reef for more about the 2015 observations.